Taking Sides: Rock vs Pop

1. Older boys at school circa 1988 with Marillion / Doors records under their arms sneering at anyone who questioned their taste on whatever grounds as being flimsy, lightweight, twee, implicitly homosexual. Being older and in gangs, they were very good at browbeating dissenting parties (me), and they laboured under the idea that they were “taking risks” with their musical choices. Like, Jim Morrisson, drugs, french poetry, far out man. In reality their tastes were utterly predictable and an aid to fraternal bonding. The same phenomenon is clear today in the hype around GYBE and other post rock sacred cows, it’s the kind of aggressive, predictable Fraternity chauvinism you can see in pitchforkmedia’s reviews. But I’m not bitter, clearly.

2. The baffling idea promulgated in the 60s that Steppenwolf were somehow more “important” than the Monkees or even the 1810 Fruitgum Company.

Pop is the land of escape from all this horrible bullshit. Subjective words, I know, but convince me otherwise.

Pop means whatever is popular and on the radio (including the guitar-rock that is allegedly its opposite), which can mean real shit and for a while pretty much did (think Perry Como and Patty Page) before rock and roll poked its head in.

So in my book Destiny's Child, Daft Punk and Radiohead are all pop and all rock, whether they want to be or not. However, Belle & Sebastian (say), at least in a North American context, are strictly rock, never having made any kind of pop impact here. If I have to choose, I guess I'll take rock because it excludes less of the music I love (great bands that never charted and such-like), and because most of the non-rock stuff I listen to (country music and such) is fairly rock-like in spirit, if not in sound.

For every attempt at a definition that I come up with, I can quickly think of a counter-example. The closest I can get is that rock usually tries to "mean something" first and foremost and entertain second. "Meaning something" could be expressing some kind of personal or political worldview or alternatively an attempt to play out some sort of theory about how music could/should be constructed (e.g Eno).Pop usually avoids these things, and prioritises hooks, beats, melodies and simple messages first.

As I said this is fairly flimsy and I expect to see it bettered - one thing I am fairly sure of though is that when the best elements of both rock and pop are combined it's a thrill. Can's "I Want More" , Wire's "Outdoor Miner", Nirvana etc etc etc

I'd love to hear Eno produce All Saints.

rock = created with 'real' instruments

pop = created with machines (turntables, samplers, computers, etc), occasionally using elements of these 'real' instruments, but not as a the focus

in that way, 'rockstars' are best known for manipulating the instruments in the way that 'popstars' aren't. if there's a guitar on a beatles song, you say 'oh my goodness, who is this playing the guitar on this beatles song?'. if there's a guitar on an outkast song, you say 'good guitar on that outkast song, eh?'. the idea of instrumentation is treated with the artist as a musical compiler, instead of a 'band' playing their 'instruments'. redefine in your terms for chartpop or techno or whatever.

it gets blurry when you look at soul or jazz or funk, where session musicians were common and the idea of the player as an artist was slight. i think this dates back to the 50s pop, where the person doing the song AT THIS MOMENT was the star and not the fool banging drums. i guess that's the idea, that pop is something conceptual and rock is something technical. so, duh, i take pop.

Both terms have current generic definitions which undergo occasional shifts - pop now means a kind of hook-based (rather than melodic) music in which the emphasis is on the studio rather than the instrumentation. Rock shifts about less as a genre and seems to mean amplified guitar music. In this generic sense, Britney is pop and U2 aren't. Im thinking here of acts that you wouldn't call anything other than 'pop' or 'rock'.

But obviously U2 are pop in a wider sense, the non-generic sense of music that makes some kind of mass connection. In this sense, Pop is something that appeared when recording technology and mass communication made it possible for music to have a life beyond the local and the academy, and for consumers of music to be aware of this life (by "charts" for instance). Country music, and doo-wop, and rock and roll, and soul, and house, and acid rock, and west coast pop, and reggae, and the genres 'rock' and 'pop' outlined above are all moments within Pop: some more significant perhaps than others, or longer lasting, or more dominant in specific markets.

So what is Rock, then? For me Rock is a way of thinking about and approaching Pop which turned up in the 1960s and was very useful for a while after that and has been increasingly less useful since probably the end of the 1970s. It's a hierarchical arrangement of pop, if you like, to value albums and live performances and long careers and subcultural capital. This was excellent from a music business point of view since albums and long careers make more money than singles and the radio and faceless artists. The subcultural capital bit is good too because it gets people into the music emotionally.

But I'm not sure it's quite enough to say that these definitions are bad in and of themselves, and that it's all one continuum, which is Dr. C's point, and one for which I have a great deal of sympathy. The thing about the definitions is that even when they claim to be neutral, they import value judgements. This is not a bad thing -- who wants to be (or could be) a value-free zone? So rather than looking for neutrality, let's mix it a bit, and definitions are a way of doing that.

That having been said, 'pop' and 'rock' generally don't get us very far. Which is why I like Chuck Eddy and Kodwo Eshun so much, who in very different ways manage to write about music by inventing new categories and definitions continuously, and sometimes to the point of self-parody. Work like this recognises that this whole damn game is about value (and it's political as much as aesthetic) already. What are we doing here talking about one record rather than another, one artist rather than another, listening to one rather than another, if we aren't making value judgements of some sort the whole time.

So how do we define: from the point of view of the creation of the music; from the point of view of the marketing of the music; from the point of view of the consumption of the music? There's probably something to be said for all three, but today I probably favour the third point of view. I don't consume 'rock' or 'pop.' Do you?

Good things were done in the twilight years of jazz (Miles Davis for one) and so rock fans needn’t despair, but the real action is elsewhere and has been since Glam.

So, basically, to me, all music is pop music. It just depends on the week - if you hit the top 40 (or even 100, if we want to be generous), you are pop music.

Rock music is trickier, because to me ROCK is all about guitars and drums and singers coming together in some monster behemoth of music - but take a look at the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, which is full of soul and R&B and "pop" (in the traditional sense of melodic music) artists. So, it seems like rock music is anything too.

In light of this, I came to the conclusion a few months ago that ROCK is about attitude more than your actual music. Britney Spears is ROCK because she has a rock attitude and dresses in a rock fashion. Christian Aguilera, while a similar artist musically, is NOT rock because she is whiny and mamby pamby and uninteresting.

So, to me, ROCK and POP have nothing to do with the actual music, it's all about attitude and sales and the perception of the people. Therefore, my vote goes to ROCK, because it's all about the attitude.

There was a time when Michael Stipe would get offended if you called him a pop star, even if that someone was Andy Warhol, who, of course, conferred the term only as the highest compliment. "It was, like, 'I'm a musician, so don't you dare call me a pop star.' Andy said, 'So, you're a pop star?' and I went, 'No, I"m a musician.' He went, 'Michael, you're a pop star,' and I went, 'Andy, I'm a musician.' Then, he said, 'Well, you're very cute.'

As for pop, is it possible that British and American people have pretty different views on what that is, given how much more inclusive the mainstream is in the UK ? I mean, My Bloody Valentine, The Smiths, Pulp and techno all have/had pop chart access over there, as did punk and reggae, long before anyone was interested in those in the US. I mean, all I can think about when I think of pop over here is how *narrow* and exclusionary it has become.

For that reason I'm wary to try to make a serious distinction between rock and pop. For the most part you can differentiate things like classical, jazz, blues and hiphop from other genres, but with the amount of fusion going on these days, even that's getting hard to tell. I'm tempted to say that it's all pop music and leave it that, but I've always skipped across supposed genre lines anyhow.

The actual things I listen to most, especially now, are compilation tapes of favourite tracks and MP3 playlists. Full albums account for about 15% of my music time.

As several people have said, 'Rock' was *defined* in the mid to late 60's. It's album-oriented and guitars are mandatory. As Tom suggests, Elvis links to Britney because it was all 'Pop' in the 50's (well of course it wasn't because there was 'R&B' as well, but there was certainly no 'Rock'/'Pop' distinction). Rock changes less than Pop because it has to stick to the guitar-dominated format; otherwise it ceases to *be* 'Rock'. You sense that with all the moogs, theremins, and scratchings that have crept in over the last 4-5 years. It's all window dressing - add-ons to the all-important core of guitar/bass/drums.

um, this is 2001 not 1972;)

anyway, what a question. given what's currently on the charts, i'd have to unequivocally say pop. in fact, right now i'm quite convinced there's more creativity and life on the local top 40 station than in the indie rock section at the local indie record store.

historically, yes, making this separation has been a way to create an aesthetic hierarchy with patriarchal and sometimes racial implications and a totally bullshit political front on the whole thing. i'd also blame this elitism for the insularity of today's indie culture. most of my popular-music collection is still on the rock side. that is changing as the only popular music that interests me right now is hip-hop and electronic.

i have no doubt, actually, that elvis has *more* in common with britney than he does with radiohead or the dismemberment plan.

Also, Folk = Documentary,

Metal = Horror,

Dance = Action,

R&B/Funk = Porno,

Country = Western,

Adult Contempory = Romance

Indie = umm.. Indie

I'm sure there are more music/film parallels too. My point - all things are part of the same type of spectrum. To me, it's like defining the difference between red and blue - really difficult to do without mentioning other parts of the spectrum. It's easy to recognize and define similarity or disparity of one thing relative to another, but it's impossible to draw any meaningful lines at specific points in the range.

Yes, but you know what I mean...I was talking about fundamentally guitar-dominated bands thinking, a few years ago, that it might be about time they used a theremin or some scratching to make their sound a bit more...'cutting edge', 'innovative' whatever.

2. But I can't help thinking that this question, in this particular context, is equivalent to 'When did you stop beating your wife?'. 99% of people are going to line up and say they love Pop for its glossy immediacy and dislike Rock for its heavy-handed guitar-based self- importance.

3. In other words (?), both terms are, I suspect, *rhetorical*. I mean, we seem often to use them not just neutrally to denote something, but to make a point, to imply a value judgement. Our choice of favoured term for our own listening is not arbitrary but loaded.

4. My choice (I wonder why?) is 'pop'. And people (not you people - stoopid people elsewhere) still accuse me of not liking pop.

i am very very straight. not gay, ok?

― man

I'll give you some names to get some musical culture: Led zep, beatles, stones, oasis, blur, coldplay, the clash, pink floyd, cream, radiohead, kula shaker, pearl jam, the charlatans, the strokes, the doors, yes, jethro tull, the who, the verve, blind melon, santana, hendrix, stone roses, air, king krimson, bob dylan, and the black crowes.

Poor Blind Melon. They just can't keep a lead singer around.

Lady GaGa, Cheryl Cole and La Roux have helped pop overtake rock as the best-selling music genre in the UK.

Some 33.5% of singles sold in 2009 were classed as pop by the Official Charts Company (OCC) - up from 28% in 2008.

A further 18.9% were R&B, including JLS, Beyonce, Dizzee Rascal under the OCC's guidelines. Almost 9% came from hip-hop acts like the Black Eyed Peas.

But rock's share slumped from 31% to 24.5% - led by Rage Against the Machine, Kings of Leon and Kasabian.

Geoff Taylor, chief executive of record label body the BPI, said: "There's no doubting that 2009 was a vintage year for pop - some fantastic records led to a strong performance by the genre in both albums and singles.

"British urban talent shone in the R&B sector, virtually doubling their sales last year thanks to Tinchy Stryder, Dizzee Rascal, Chipmunk, N-Dubz and Taio Cruz."

In the albums market, acts classed as pop took 29%, up from 25% the previous year, with R&B on 9.6%.

Rock's share fell from 35.7% to 31%, with Kings of Leon's Only By The Night the only rock album to sell more than a million copies.

TOP UK SINGLES OF 2009
Lady GaGa

1. Lady GaGa (above) - Poker Face (Genre: pop)
2. Black Eyed Peas - I Gotta Feeling (hip-hop)
3. Lady GaGa - Just Dance (pop)
4. Cheryl Cole - Fight For This Love (pop)
5. Joe McElderry - The Climb (pop)
6. La Roux - In For The Kill (pop)
7. Black Eyed Peas - Boom Boom Pow (hip-hop)
8. Rage Against The Machine - Killing in the Name (rock)
9. Alexandra Burke ft Flo Rida - Bad Boys (pop)
10. Black Eyed Peas - Meet Me Halfway (hip-hop)
Source: BPI/Official Charts Company